Here's my question: in light of what Mozilla is doing, why don't other forks like Waterfox or Librewolf write a manifesto/contract saying they'll never sell your user data and won't turn "evil" (until they do, of course), and then decide to offer a paid version of their browser.
Two possible outcomes:
1. No one cares. No one pays for it. Nothing changes and nobody loses anything.
2. Enough people pay for it to keep the product healthy and the user-centric promise alive. The Internet is saved.
So why isn't anyone trying to replace Mozilla yet, with a more sane business model than living on the back of Google's fear of antitrust investigation? What's the worse that can happen?
Just sell a bonafide paid version alongside the free one, don't just rely on donations. There is a massive difference between offering a paid product and begging passers-by to spare some change.
The problem with paid versions, is that I don't really trust them either. MBA creep will happen and suddenly the TOS changes and my paid tier is going to have data collection and 'some' ads. I have to move to a high tier to avoid them. After a few cycles of that, one day all the tiers have data collection and ads.
> The problem with paid versions, is that I don't really trust them either.
Yes, Trust is at the foundation of the whole problem with the Tech Industry:
/1/ users (consumers) expect to be protected (not injured, not cheated, not surveilled) by the products that they use, and
/2/ the WWW is a monstrosity, the only software that we can in fact trust is never connected to the Internet (in other words, we don't trust any software)
Ergo...
Given /2/, we cannot trust any software, full stop. Even paying $CORP for its products is no guarantee of care, safety, and security.
and
Given /1/, which software do we accept? For OS, I prefer Linux by far. Even where usability is a little rough, I can exclude components that I do not want. When obliged to use Windows, I hold my nose and try as much as possible to foil all the bloat, anti-user patterns, and telemetry. I resent it all the way!
I prefer Firefox because I like the features and I insist on a small set of extensions: uBlock Origin, Multi-Account Containers, Privacy Badger. Google is a nasty surveillance ecosystem and Microsoft is a Spaghetti Western: by turns good, bad, and ugly.
If it will fund further development and maintain the current commitment to respect for privacy, I am willing to allow Mozilla to do some aggregate analysis of my browsing habits, just as I am willing to provide survey answers for products that I buy.
I don't love the aggregate analysis, but Mozilla needs to do browser business in the modern world.
The tech industry is just one rug-pull after another, but still people line up to try standing on the rugs!
1. We won't show ads in our product -> We'll show skippable unobtrusive adds in our free product only -> We'll show bottom-of-the-barrel scum ads in our free product only -> Those skippable ads are now not skippable -> We'll add a few vetted ads to the paid product -> We're going to shove ads onto every surface of the product we can find!
2. We don't collect or sell data about you -> We will collect limited data for "telemetry." -> We'll also collect some demographic data "to improve the product." -> We're going to collect everything we can get our hands on, but we won't sell it. -> We share your data with only vetted, trusted "partners." -> We share your data with everyone we do business with -> We firehose your data to anyone willing to pay for it!
It's the same progression every time, but users keep thinking this time it will be different.
Paid version have that problem somewhat less because they have a source of income that could dry up if they do. Paying someone means they are beholden to you as well, while free gives you nothing.
There is a reason I get my email via fastmail: they differentiate themselves on privacy features. I also have my own ___domain, so if fastmail does turn evil they know I can easially move away. I can run my own email server, but having done that I know it is harder than I want. There are other services I'd pay for if I could find someone I could trust to take a small amount of money. (small is key - plenty would do this for thousands, but I don't have that much free cash)
Don't get me wrong, the above is not very large, but it is still something.
Nothing is forever, but if you get a contract that prohibits their data play (collection, derivation, sale, all of it...) for a year or whatever, you're good for that long. That'd be enough for me.
You have to trust and/or monitor and apply active pressure to (something that virtually nobody does) the developers to some extent either way. The difference with a paid distribution is that there's at least some revenue that helps keep the project afloat, and with a free distribution there's not.
e.g. if you have a CEO/lead developer that's initially acting responsibly, but has a "bankruptcy threshold" beyond which they'll start selling your data, a revenue stream will stave that point off.
A modern equivalent to the 'usenet death penalty' is what's really needed. Without a grassroots method to censure and more or less permanently injunct and/or eject bad actors, you can't stop them from harvesting profit from the ecosystem to the exclusion of all other concerns.
Yes, this. When Mozilla (or any other corporation) demonstrates positive cashflow, the odds of MBAs and other vulture capitalists descending on it increase massively. And I have never seen customer agreements like this survive a buy-out: the new owners are never constrained by the promises (or even contracts) of the previous company.
My comment is targeted to the developers of Waterfox and Librewolf - they're already making a browser, so the hard part is done.
I'm wondering why don't they try to step it up further by selling a paid version alongside their open source product. What is the worst that can happen? Nobody pays for it and they continue making $0 just like they are happily doing now.
https://buymeacoffee.com/waterfox wasn't hard to find that. (they also make money from search). Put your money where your mouth is and donate.
Librewolf doesn't want to deal with the administrative overhead of donations - which if they'd only get a few donations makes sense. It likely costs several hundred a month just to hire the accountants and lawyers needed to get the paper work right (you can do it yourself at cost of time doing other things. Often you can find accountants and lawyers who will donate their services, but it is still several hundred dollars worth)
Sure, I'm not counting those who contribute with their work. But if you don't contribute with your work or with your money – that's a freeloader by definition.
A paid version needs to offer something on top of it, which is usually in one way or another proprietary (such as a proprietary service).
Something like this is regarded as the enshitification process, so what typically happens is they (e.g. VC) want to do such after they lured in their users. Which Firefox has (or arguably: had), but Waterfox and Librewolf have not.
Good thought experiment.
It ain't the first drama or controversy with regards to Mozilla, who have had a long tendency which didn't occur recently (and included the time Eich was there). Nostalgia just makes people forget the bad.
It does actually seem pretty difficult to sell a browser; I don’t really see how anybody in their right mind would trust a closed source browser. So, it will be hard to make any parts of it proprietary. It isn’t impossible to sell open source software of course, but it does seem to be pretty difficult.
Rather, I wish we would stop accepting web standards that don’t come with reference implementations. Then, we could have a reference browser, and just run that. I don’t expect it to be performant, but I also don’t think browser performance matters much at all. Web pages are not HPC applications.
Currently we’re accepting the anti-competitive behavior of Google, just DDoSing the community with new standards to implement. This is the root problem. The fact that Mozilla is being killed by funding problems is downstream of the fact that maintaining a web browser requires multiple full time engineers.
And making a browser that's actually financially viable enough to pay for your time and effort without pissing off your user base because of paid features is even worse.
Especially in a crowded market, where we're arguing extensively about a browser that has 2.54% of the market share. Chrome (67%), Safari (18%), Edge (5.2%) [1]
Most of those also have a browser mostly as add-ons, bundling, ecosystem value, or trademark / brand name trojans.
Admittedly, if you're looking to make a browser, there's a lot of various prior attempts that remain in existence, yet have never really received that much attention. [2]
Personal preference is that somebody would implement a scripting language alternative other than Javascript. Anybody heard of TCL lately? It's supposed to be a browser scripting language alternative according to the w3.org specification [3] Really, almost anything other than Javascript as an alternative. Just for some variety.
I am at the point where I would happily pay an annual subscription on the order of a few hundred dollars per year just to avoid the headaches of today's browsers. Don't add new features, don't change the look of anything, just give me security updates and bug fixes. The only problem with this model is what we saw happen to the streaming services; paying to avoid ads just means your data is worth that much more. Paying for a higher-tier plan is a signal that you have a greater level of disposable income, and are hence more valuable to advertisers.
When this topic has been discussed on Hacker News in the past, it has also been pointed out that developing a browser with feature parity to Firefox or Chrome would be prohibitively expensive.
Tbh while I have been using Kagi as search and their AI assistant a lot lately, their browser lacks massively in functionality. uBlock Origin has never been working for me, neither on macOS nor on iOS, and for me it just doesn't deliver enough to convince me to switch.
What is a fair price? Developers are not cheap and you need to pay many of them every month (or get the equivalent in donated time). We can debate that number of course, so I'm going to start the discussion at $50/year. So your "lifetime sponser" is only worth 3 years (ignoring interest which isn't significant at this time scale).
Accounting for lifetime anything is hard (I don't know how to do the math, I'm sure people that do debate a lot of complex issues), but I'm again going to suggest that a lifetime subscription needs to be 20x the yearly fee to give a number to start the debate at.
And it crashes constantly. Lots of other bugs that you start noticing when doing deeper things. I tried it for about six months. Just not a reliable or serious browser although very fast when it actually works.
Kagi has several repos open for contributions [1] but Orion isn’t fully open source yet [2]:
> Is Orion open-source?
>
> We're working on it! We've started with some of our components and intend to open more in the future.
>
> Forking WebKit, porting hundreds of APIs, and writing a browser app from scratch has been challenging for our small team. Properly maintaining an open-source project takes time and resources that we are currently short on. If you would like to contribute, please consider becoming active on orionfeedback.org.
It’s not obvious to me which of their public repos are Orion components.
You can contribute translations [3], bugs [4], and docs [5]. Orion is based on WebKit, so you can contribute upstream there [6]. Oodles of open issues on their bugzilla [7]
please do tip a fork. Right now this money seems to go to one person, but if that person starts making significant money we can probably talk them into hiring others to work on the project.
also, slightly related, people should look into / take inspiration tor browser. they're really great at releasing regular updates with high quality and features, surely they know how to handle this kind of projects
This idea of having an moral alignment covenant I think is a great one. I'm fed up of being bait-and-switched by companies that get buy-in by being open and friendly, and then later they decide to kill the golden goose. If you're committed to FOSS then commit! Make it official so that people can trust that you're not going to enshittify later.
Two possible outcomes:
1. No one cares. No one pays for it. Nothing changes and nobody loses anything.
2. Enough people pay for it to keep the product healthy and the user-centric promise alive. The Internet is saved.
So why isn't anyone trying to replace Mozilla yet, with a more sane business model than living on the back of Google's fear of antitrust investigation? What's the worse that can happen?
Just sell a bonafide paid version alongside the free one, don't just rely on donations. There is a massive difference between offering a paid product and begging passers-by to spare some change.